Two of my favourite poets have very, very different emotional tones to their body of work- and in selected poems that I really, really love from them.
Everyone knows Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, if you’re a fan of her work. (You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on.) but another one I’m very fond of is called Morning. It’s about a morning in her kitchen, with little wonders, and her sweet pet cat. My favourite lines are these:
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder. / Then wants to go out into the world / where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn. / I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.
Mary’s work is beautiful, and light- and harbours such a deep appreciation for the joys and simplicities of life- stroking a cat’s fur, light shining brilliantly through glass, milk in a blue bowl (of a particular colour, a detail noted down lovingly.) It’s hopeful in the way New Years is hopeful: it’s a soft little bubble of joy that’s iridescent and ephemeral and sometimes, that’s too delicate for me to handle. Sometimes it’s too difficult to try to be happy, or to sit in that effervescent delight with the world when you’ve having a hard time stomaching existing in it.
When things are heavy, and I want to feel not so alone in that pain, and I’m sick to the teeth of sobbing intermittently for no real reason at all, then I’ll open up Siken’s work, and cry because being understood is cathartic, even if it makes me weep like a child. You are Jeff is a long, lovely poem, but it’s closing lines really resonate with me.
“Like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your / heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something / you / don’t even have a name for.”
And from Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out:
"You will be alone always and then you will die. / So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog / of non-definitive acts, / something other than desperation. / You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
Sometimes you just have to sit with the feeling of sadness and let it wash over you and weep until you’re wrung dry. Thank God for poetry, at least. At least there’s that saving grace.
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